Common gamer wisdom says that in order to achieve maturity, realism, and thematic complexity in video games, developers have to add cutting-edge technology: vivid graphics, plausibly animated characters, advanced systems of artificial intelligence. So the notion that a sophisticated story experience is best attained not by marching forward technologically but through restraint and good design is somewhat radical.

Yet that’s exactly what the four-person Fullbright Company set out to prove with Gone Home, a new PC release that’s being widely lauded as one of the best storytelling games in some time. It does a few remarkable, even brave things, thematically—like exploring the relationship of two teenage girls in love, and focusing only on a troubled family. But what makes Gone Home a special achievement among games, though, is all the things it doesn’t do. Many developers have longed to incorporate literary storytelling elements into video games for a while now—but they often stick to the formulas of commercial action thrillers anyway. Gone Home represents a necessary shift in focus, and it does so in a no-frills way that other video-game developers would be wise to take note of.

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Gone Home takes place in an empty house in the Pacific Northwest, dauntingly large and littered with fresh artifacts of its inhabitants’ lives. The main character is Katie Greenbriar, who’s recently returned from a year abroad and has just arrived at the sprawling old inherited home where her family’s been moving in. But there, she discovers that everyone is missing—and an ominous note on the front door from her teenage sister, Samantha, warns her not to go searching. The delicate little story that emerges as Katie explores the house, reading notes and examining objects left behind, is much like the design itself in that it relies on conventions only to subvert them. It’s so delicate, in fact, that to say too much about it spoils the game.

But what can be said is this: It’s about a troubled middle-class family; their nonconformist and witty teenage daughter (Katie’s sister Sam); and Sam's first love, a girl from her school named Lonnie. Their story unfolds through letters, photographs, Super Nintendo cartridges, and music tapes, peppered with the Riot Grrrl spirit of the early 1990s (the music of Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, and The Youngins has been licensed for the soundtrack, alongside Chris Remo’s original score). The '90s are the perfect time frame tonally, but there’s a functional purpose for setting the story there, too. Without all the implements of the modern digital age, there's more for the player to look at and do; today, one could probably find out all Sam's secrets just by getting hold of her phone.

The game’s reception from the traditional gamer community has been fascinating—and revealing. To many of these players, a game whose only action consists of examination and exploration is no game at all. “I went from start to end in one minute, 10 seconds, and 40 milliseconds,” one forum commenter on a Steam community page complained to fellow gamers. “This is not a game.” Much of the criticism is so fervent you’d think the army of 18- to 24-year-old males who make up the bulk of gaming’s old-guard audience were deeply afraid the nature and purpose of playing digital games might change.

But Gone Home has received universally strong reviews from the gaming press, and perhaps even more telling is the outpouringof personalessays from players. For fans who have been waiting to see whether games can express their own experience, Gone Home feels like a long-awaited gift: “I’m not sure how else to say it, but it made my heart hurt in the best way,” independent game creator Zoe Quinn wrote on her Tumblr. “All of the little details in their relationship reminded me so closely of some of my own experiences, even the stuff that wasn’t uncannily similar.”

Gone Home also feels a bit like an experiment. It's a new, effective attack on the convention that in order to be plausible and poignant, game stories necessarily need more complicated systems, higher-resolution graphics, the participation of real-world actors, and heaps of choices and rewards. The game runs counter to the philosophy governing, say, the E3 Electronic Entertainment Expo, a lavish annual showcase of the commercial gaming industry’s freshest offerings tells fans, the press, and retailers alike what they ought to want to buy, alongside throbbing speakers and bright lights. At this summer’s event, French studio Quantic Dream tried to dazzle audiences with a fully-rendered digital human head so lifelike that its eyes seemed to penetrate onlookers, and some Next Great Military Game—one of the many—pointed to the forearm hair detail of its virtual soldiers as evidence that the future is here.

Steve Gaynor, founder of Gone Home developer The Fullbright Company, got his start in this world of big budgets and blistering combat. He and his colleagues did several years of work on 2K Games’ key BioShock franchise, which aims to combine first-person combat with politically charged locales. Gaynor earned acclaim from the gaming press in 2010 when he led design on Minerva’s Den, a self-contained downloadable adjunct to the BioShock 2 universe.

Guiding a player through a meaningful narrative experience in a combat-focused game is more difficult than it might sound. How do you make sure the player follows the intended route, discovers the necessary information, and still keeps his or her crucial sense of agency over the experience? But Minerva’s Den was uncommonly deft, and in the wake of its positive reception, Gaynor wondered what it would be like to make a game about discovering a story within a world. What would it be like to make a game only about that discovery, without the combat, weapons, lore, or dialogue? Hoping to find out, Gaynor left 2K with two colleagues, co-founders Johnnemann Nordhagen and Karla Zimonja, and the trio packed up for Gaynor’s old hometown of Portland to try something new.

In a perfect rejection of both traditional video games and gay-tragedy-tropes alike, the stark, bright red stains the player comes up upon in a dimly-lit bathroom turn out to be hair dye.

Small games have small budgets, so Gone Home’s story had to be confined to a single location: a house. (Its creative team found itself in a similar situation, as Gaynor, his wife, and his colleagues moved into a large shared home and worked full-time on developing the game.) Gone Home couldn’t have realistically animated, vividly forearm-haired characters, so the house had to be empty. Making it dark outside simplified the graphical obligations (the windows, for instance, became less complicated once they weren’t looking out over a daytime scene). In a way, the simplification of the setting actually enhances the effectiveness of the game overall; the lack of flashy environmental “realism” minimizes distraction, allowing the player to focus fully on its affecting story.

To be fair, though, graphical realism isn’t the only realism missing from Gone Home. A common criticism the game has received thus far (besides “Who in the world has a house that big?!”) is that for most kids, especially in the 1990s, coming out has been much more fraught; finding oneself and finding love are often a much more painful challenge for gay teens than the game’s sweet, simple story suggests. (A separate phenomenon—the “queering” of games—has been observable only over the past few years; tools for both game-making and community-building have become more accessible, simpler, and more affordable to encourage people who might have previously felt alienated from the often-hypermasculine games industry to finally try participating. Games about identity and non-heterosexual experiences have already been flourishing in text formats and among passionate fans and critics, but it’s refreshing to see a story about two girls’ love in a format average players recognize.)

For video-game designers, though, erring on the side of gentleness is probably wise, for now. Gone Home’s lesbian love story is treated with dignity and restraint, admirably avoiding the clichés most media stumble into when trying to tell stories about gay people: The characters are not made tragic poster children, nor objects of pathos for straight guilt. In a perfect rejection of both traditional video games and gay-tragedy-tropes alike, the stark, bright red stains the player comes up upon in a dimly-lit bathroom turn out to be hair dye.

Fans have long dreamed that someday, video games would be viewed as a sophisticated medium of immersive storytelling, garnering the same kind of cultural legitimacy as cinema or other art forms. Largely, though, the games that have mainstreamed gaming (Nintendo’s Wii software, Candy Crush Saga, Rock Band) have little interest in immersive storytelling or some quintessence of the human experience. Though passionate fans of gaming may long for it to play the role of high art, the most avid game consumers—those who reliably move truckloads of Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto from store shelves—often resemble a certain breed of sports fan, hungry for the simple rush of moment-to-moment action. The games that sustain the commercial industry by their sales tend to be sequels to those that have done so before.

Though unusual in its willingness to be simple, small, and human, Gone Home probably isn't going to be the game that singlehandedly revolutionizes how broader audiences think about video games. Its keyboard and mouse controls are still traditional PC gaming language, and it was released on Steam, a popular digital storefront among fans. But the combination of these familiar elements with a fresh, surprising approach to storytelling could, in fact, be a boon: More players and developers will be exposed to Gone Home’s important message that games can, in fact, gain meaning, and they can do it by doing more with less.

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Congressional Republicans and conservative pundits had the chance to signal to Trump that his attacks on law enforcement are unacceptable—but they sent the opposite message.

President Trump raged at his TV on Sunday morning. And yet on balance, he had a pretty good weekend. He got a measure of revenge upon the hated FBI, firing former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe two days before his pension vested. He successfully coerced his balky attorney general, Jeff Sessions, into speeding up the FBI’s processes to enable the firing before McCabe’s retirement date.

Beyond this vindictive fun for the president, he achieved something politically important. The Trump administration is offering a not very convincing story about the McCabe firing. It is insisting that the decision was taken internally by the Department of Justice, and that the president’s repeated and emphatic demands—public and private—had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

The first female speaker of the House has become the most effec­tive congressional leader of modern times—and, not coinciden­tally, the most vilified.

Last May, TheWashington Post’s James Hohmann noted “an uncovered dynamic” that helped explain the GOP’s failure to repeal Obamacare. Three current Democratic House members had opposed the Affordable Care Act when it first passed. Twelve Democratic House members represent districts that Donald Trump won. Yet none voted for repeal. The “uncovered dynamic,” Hohmann suggested, was Nancy Pelosi’s skill at keeping her party in line.

She’s been keeping it in line for more than a decade. In 2005, George W. Bush launched his second presidential term with an aggressive push to partially privatize Social Security. For nine months, Republicans demanded that Democrats admit the retirement system was in crisis and offer their own program to change it. Pelosi refused. Democratic members of Congress hosted more than 1,000 town-hall meetings to rally opposition to privatization. That fall, Republicans backed down, and Bush’s second term never recovered.

Invented centuries ago in France, the bidet has never taken off in the States. That might be changing.

“It’s been completely Americanized!” my host declares proudly. “The bidet is gone!” In my time as a travel editor, this scenario has become common when touring improvements to hotels and resorts around the world. My heart sinks when I hear it. To me, this doesn’t feel like progress, but prejudice.

Americans seem especially baffled by these basins. Even seasoned American travelers are unsure of their purpose: One globe-trotter asked me, “Why do the bathrooms in this hotel have both toilets and urinals?” And even if they understand the bidet’s function, Americans often fail to see its appeal. Attempts to popularize the bidet in the United States have failed before, but recent efforts continue—and perhaps they might even succeed in bringing this Old World device to new backsides.

How evangelicals, once culturally confident, became an anxious minority seeking political protection from the least traditionally religious president in living memory

One of the most extraordinary things about our current politics—really, one of the most extraordinary developments of recent political history—is the loyal adherence of religious conservatives to Donald Trump. The president won four-fifths of the votes of white evangelical Christians. This was a higher level of support than either Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, an outspoken evangelical himself, ever received.

Trump’s background and beliefs could hardly be more incompatible with traditional Christian models of life and leadership. Trump’s past political stances (he once supported the right to partial-birth abortion), his character (he has bragged about sexually assaulting women), and even his language (he introduced the words pussy and shithole into presidential discourse) would more naturally lead religious conservatives toward exorcism than alliance. This is a man who has cruelly publicized his infidelities, made disturbing sexual comments about his elder daughter, and boasted about the size of his penis on the debate stage. His lawyer reportedly arranged a $130,000 payment to a porn star to dissuade her from disclosing an alleged affair. Yet religious conservatives who once blanched at PG-13 public standards now yawn at such NC-17 maneuvers. We are a long way from The Book of Virtues.

As the Trump presidency approaches a troubling tipping point, it’s time to find the right term for what’s happening to democracy.

Here is something that, even on its own, is astonishing: The president of the United States demanded the firing of the former FBI deputy director, a career civil servant, after tormenting him both publicly and privately—and it worked.

The American public still doesn’t know in any detail what Andrew McCabe, who was dismissed late Friday night, is supposed to have done. But citizens can see exactly what Donald Trump did to McCabe. And the president’s actions are corroding the independence that a healthy constitutional democracy needs in its law enforcement and intelligence apparatus.

McCabe’s firing is part of a pattern. It follows the summary removal of the previous FBI director and comes amid Trump’s repeated threats to fire the attorney general, the deputy attorney, and the special counsel who is investigating him and his associates. McCabe’s ouster unfolded against a chaotic political backdrop which includes Trump’s repeated calls for investigations of his political opponents, demands of loyalty from senior law enforcement officials, and declarations that the job of those officials is to protect him from investigation.

Much more than time separates the 27th president from the 45th: from their vastly different views on economics, to their conceptions of the presidency itself.

As Donald Trump’s executive orders punishing steel and aluminum imports threaten a trade war around the globe, Republicans on Capitol Hill are debating whether to reassert Congress’s ultimate constitutional authority over tariffs and trade. This isn’t the first time the GOP has split itself in two on the question of protective tariffs. But the last time, just over 100 years ago, the Republican president’s policies were the exact opposite of Trump’s.

William Howard Taft—in his opposition to populism and protectionism, as well as his devotion to constitutional limits on the powers of the presidency—was essentially the anti-Trump. Unlike the current president, and his own predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft refused to rule by executive order, insisting that the chief executive could only exercise those powers that the Constitution explicitly authorizes.

Among the more practical advice that can be offered to international travelers is wisdom of the bathroom. So let me say, as someone who recently returned from China, that you should be prepared to one, carry your own toilet paper and two, practice your squat.

I do not mean those goofy chairless sits you see at the gym. No, toned glutes will not save you here. I mean the deep squat, where you plop your butt down as far as it can go while staying aloft and balanced on the heels. This position—in contrast to deep squatting on your toes as most Americans naturally attempt instead—is so stable that people in China can hold it for minutes and perhaps even hours ...

The debate around sexual-harassment legislation is playing out in the Maryland General Assembly, where reform advocates say leadership is loath to embrace changes.

In Maryland, legislative sessions run 90 days, from January through early April. On the final day of each session—commonly referred to by the Latin term sine die—the capital city of Annapolis lets its hair down. There is dining and dancing and parties galore as aides, lawmakers, and lobbyists celebrate having survived the season.

A few years back, at one sine die soiree hosted by a legislator, a former Annapolis aide (who requested anonymity because she remains involved in Maryland politics) took to the dance floor. “I was dancing a little bit by myself,” she recalled. “All of a sudden I hear, ‘You’re packing a little bit more than I thought back here!’ I turn around, and this legislator is dancing right behind me. I was like, ‘Ooookay. This is a little weird. I know your wife and kids.’ So I tried to subtly move away.” The legislator followed, recalled the ex-aide. And then: “He got aroused.” The young woman made a swift escape, and, she informed me, “I have not spoken to that legislator one-on-one since.”

Scholars have been sounding the alarm about data-harvesting firms for nearly a decade. The latest Cambridge Analytica scandal shows it may be too late to stop them.

On Friday night, Facebook suspended the account of Cambridge Analytica, the political-data company backed by the billionaire Robert Mercer that consulted on both the Brexit and Trump campaigns.

The action came just before The Guardian and The New York Timesdropped major reports in which the whistle-blower Christopher Wylie alleged that Cambridge Analytica had used data that an academic had allegedly improperly exfiltrated from the social network. These new stories, backed by Wylie’s account and internal documents, followed years of reporting by The Guardianand The Intercept about the possible problem.

The details could seem Byzantine. Aleksandr Kogan, then a Cambridge academic, founded a company, Global Science Research, and immediately took on a major client, Strategic Communication Laboratories, which eventually gave birth to Cambridge Analytica. (Steve Bannon, an adviser to the company and a former senior adviser to Trump, reportedly picked the name.)

The Supreme Court will consider the rights of crisis pregnancy centers, which help women “imagine what the choice of life would be like.”

Abortion is back in the Supreme Court this week. On Tuesday, the justices will hear a case on crisis pregnancy centers, the facilities established by pro-life organizations around the country to counsel women against abortion. In 2015, California passed the Reproductive FACT Act, requiring licensed clinics that provide certain services—including ultrasounds, pregnancy tests, and advice on birth control—to post information about affordable abortion and contraception services offered by the state. Unlicensed facilities that provide these services have to disclose their lack of medical certification. A network of crisis pregnancy centers, including the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA), sued in response, arguing that the government is violating their right to free speech by forcing them to promote abortion.